Motivational Quotes

Art

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

- Motherwell, Robert

Best Quotes about Art

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

10.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

11.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

12.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

13.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

14.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

15.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

16.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

17.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

18.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

19.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

20.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

21.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

22.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

23.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

24.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

25.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

26.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

27.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

28.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

29.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

30.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

31.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

32.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

33.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

34.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

35.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

36.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

38.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

39.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

40.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

42.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

43.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

44.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

45.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

46.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

47.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

48.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

49.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

50.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.